Touchstone
by Cricket Songs
Summary: Six deaths revisited; six lessons in the making. Ziva-centric, as always, but includes pretty much everybody (including several dead somebodies). Some mild Tony/Ziva undertones.
1. Smoke

A/N: This is one I dug up on my old computer and decided to finish. I'm a little rusty, but I'll give it a whirl. It will be several chapters long. Most is already written, though, so don't fret.

Frankly, I'm appalled by the utter shortage of Ziva fics that I discovered when I decided to check back with this fandom. C'mon, guys! She's not dead! (My severity is directed more to the show runners than anybody else).

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><p>Touchstone<p>

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><p>There was a memory, soft and warm, of praying beside her sister at the wall on a sunny Friday evening. They wore their dresses, hands clasped tight against their bellies. Her sister had been quite a bit shorter than she, and so as they leaned their bare foreheads up against the wall in the flurry of prayers that surrounded them, she had cracked one eye open to peer down at Talia – and Talia had peered back, smiling and gleeful and beautifully young. They had prayed in tandem, as they'd been taught.<p>

"_Q__umi tze'i mitokh ha'hafeikhah,_" they sang. "_Rav lakh shevet b'eimeq habakha, v'hu yahamol alayikh hemlah."_

And Ziva would smile and try not to laugh as they pushed themselves from the wall and shuffled backward through the chairs to find their parents. Eli, always proud; her mother, always nervous, knowing that the girls should not have gone, knowing that Eli's authority had granted them access.

But Ziva never minded that.

They smiled when they sang.

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><p>The bomb went off on a Saturday night. That was a strategic move, she knew: with the close of Shabbat, the city's dwellers would be taking to the streets to pick up groceries, run their errands, maybe stop at the movie theater or a nice restaurant. Shop keepers would be rolling back the bars on their doors. Tourists would file out of hostels. The streets would come alive, if only briefly, in a quick and modest display of relief. Shabbat had ended – and that warm Saturday night, everyone had felt especially blessed.<p>

And so they had left the bomb tucked near a gutter on Yafo street. Plenty of foot traffic, there; plenty of fodder.

Through the murk of the smoke and fire, as she arrived to respond to the tragedy, she could see the gleam of the dark plastic bags framing the edges of the street. A haze of ground bricks where the road had buckled up beneath the crowd drifted in the air among a blare of sirens and a throaty, lilting wail. She stepped through the rubble, taking it in, trying vehemently to ignore the smell of charred flesh. The night was warm and the street already felt haunted.

It occurred to her that this was _very_ close to her mother's home – Yafo street, just south of the police station, not far from the market where she and her sister had gone to buy passion fruit smoothies in the summer when she was young. She thought of all the times she had passed through these walkways, had hurried down this street, had known these vendors and these neighbors, and thought herself lucky to have narrowly avoided a catastrophe that could have easily claimed her life.

The thought came around a moment later that this explosion was _close to her home_; and on its heels was the gnawingly dreadful realization that Tali had spent the weekend at their mother's home, and that she did not know where her sister was at that moment.

Later, she learned, her sister had gone to buy a smoothie on Yafo street.

Just south of the police station.

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><p>She left her mother in the care of her Aunt Netty and she tried to step outside of herself to deliver the news to her father and her brother, who had both been traveling abroad when it happened. She struggled to find her composure; left groping in the dark somewhere between her blinding grief and a stoic professionalism. When her father finally answered the phone she blurted, "Abba," and then realized with a flash of horror that she felt so very young. That her father made her small again.<p>

She cleared her throat and quickly corrected herself: "Eli."

But he knew, of course he knew, and she was struggling to put it into words, and before she could finish delivering this terrible news, he was saying to her, weary, "I know, Ziva. I am on my way."

By happenstance, they were left alone together at the cemetery.

Blessings given, voices choked, eyes red, the funeral was over and nearly everyone had gone. She caught sight of her brother standing quietly on the fringes of the lawn, where he had been through it all, hanging back and watching with dark, heavy eyes. He regarded their father from afar. As she watched, he scrutinized the scene without batting an eye, his gaze calculating and oddly cool. Before she could stop to consider what he might be thinking, he was gone. He slinked back into the street like a snake.

Curious, she turned to look up at her father. She examined his face, that expression. She felt very much like she knew her father very well and doubted that he could hide his emotions from her. He had a skill for remaining detached in his professional world of war, but she'd been trained to read faces, too, and he was her father and she _knew _him and she thought that it would be enough to detect the grief he was feeling.

But as she looked, there was nothing. No tell. His eyes were dark, half-lidded. A beam of light from the street corner shone on the surface of his glasses and broke across their golden frame. He looked old to her, older than he'd ever seemed before. But she could see nothing beyond it. As if his heart had been plastered up behind a wall somewhere.

She pulled her shoulders in and straightened her back.

"What happens next?" She asked, already aware of what the answer would be, but wanting the simple reassurance of her father's voice and not knowing any other way to ask for it.

"There are officers out investigating this attack." He paused. When she said nothing, straining for more, he continued. "As we speak, they are examining the damage and sifting through the claims that have been made by local organizations. It seems every time a fire starts or a building collapses, there are a dozen men stepping up to take credit."

She felt her lip twitching upward.

"This was not a simple fire," she said. "It was deliberate."

"Yes. I know."

"Do you have a lead on who might be responsible?"

There was a pause. She held her hands together against her abdomen and looked out at the graves, realizing just how badly she wanted to find vengeance and thinking how strange it was that it had taken so long for her to realize it. When her father said nothing, she turned to peer up at him.

He swallowed thickly.

"This is not something for you to worry about, Ziva. We can discuss this tomorrow. Take this time to grieve. To collect yourself."

Anger and resentment flared suddenly within her, and she found herself balking. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest.

"I do not _need _to grieve, I _am _collected, and I want to know who is responsible for this."

"Not now."

"Then _when_? When it is too late for us to fight back? I am _sick_ of waiting for others to solve these problems. She was _my _sister."

"And _my _daughter."

She wanted to cry, but that would come later. She knew she couldn't cry here in front of _him, _and her best coping method was to wound, to lash out, to _hurt_, and before she could think to hold herself back, she was hissing, "How can you say this? If you loved her, you would want someone to pay, you wouldn't be able to sleep or eat or speak, you would be _out there _looking for the people who killed her!"

He looked at her sharply and she bit her tongue so suddenly that it flared in pain and then promptly went numb; but the action was cathartic, her anger and outrage and disbelief and that overwhelming sense of _loss _leaving her so restless that she needed to lash, needed to bite.

She was wise enough to stop talking.

Her tongue began to ache.

After a moment, he looked away and began speaking.

"There is a great deal of dying here, Ziva. This is not the first family to be broken by war; not the first in Israel, not even the first on our street."

She hesitated. "And that justifies it?"

"No." He met her eyes. "That _humbles_ it."

She swallowed thickly and turned to look across the lawn, the headstones studding the hills, glowing dimly in the low light of dusk. And Talia – somewhere far below.

She shook her head once, violently.

"I'm sorry. I don't care, right now, that people here are dying and people are suffering. I've just buried my sister. She is dead now, and there is no good reason for her to be gone, and _I don't care _about anyone else in this cemetery or anyone else out there on the street. This should not have happened. There is no justification."

He was quiet for a moment; when he spoke, it seemed almost as if he were speaking to himself.

"You will understand this someday, Ziva. The strongest steel is forged of the hottest fires…you will learn from this. Be forged by it. You will understand it, someday."

And she thought that her father, try as he might, would never understand that this atrocity, this _wrongness_, could not be justified and would not be undone. Would not be reduced to some metaphor; would not be humbled.

She watched him catalog the patterns of his grief, all the broken things. She was sharp enough to know that this would not be the end of it. And the man who was struggling so valiantly to wield a human heart beneath a world of pain was being pushed beyond his means to the quietude of the realist, the humility of the fallen; all the faults she could not yet understand.

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><p>Her mother was another matter altogether. When Talia died, her mother nearly fell to pieces, and in retrospect she might've guessed that it was just a turn of fate that her mother, too, would be dead within a couple of years, long after she'd lost the will to live.<p>

Like a piece of glass, like crystal fractured, her mother nearly fell to pieces; she did not break, but ceased to shine, the surface of her marred with the spiderweb of cracks that grief had given her. She lived with the scars of Talia's death bared clear for all to see. In the first week, Eli went to her, but even that fell apart, the way things always do. And it fell to Ziva to care for her mother, to hold her as she wept, to feed her and to sit with her those long, quiet nights, when her mother would lay teary-eyed on the covers of her bed, staring at the darkness of the ceiling, hands wrung dry on a dark scarf.

Ziva watched as the throes of grief overcame her mother. Ziva watched, and, fearing what that fire would do to her, receded, stepped away, kindled anger but not grief. She hated that she felt so much like her father – hated to be hardened – but the things that grief had done to her mother made her fear the horrors that the world could inflict on a soft heart.

And so, bit by bit, she allowed her heart to harden.

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><p>AN: Here's one that's actually kinda true - reviews can lower your blood pressure and prompt the release of endorphins...for me, of course, but maybe also for you. So if you need a pick-me-up (and I could certainly use one, or two, or three) then drop a review and make the world a happier place.

More chapters are on the way!


	2. Snakes

A/N: Another chapter! Thanks for the reviews, favorites, and follows. Y'all are pretty great.

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><p>When she was seven years old, Ziva and Ari discovered a series of steps in the old city of Akko that gave them access to the rooftops. Later, Ari would swear that the discovery was his alone – that she had wanted to linger in the streets chasing alleycats, and he'd found the steps, cobbled and worn, on his own. Ari would swear that she'd been a fickle girl. Unobservant. Ari would lie – about this and other memories.<p>

They had ascended the steps on hands and knees and climbed up onto a concrete roof where the sun was unfiltered and the trash of irreverent tourists lay in rotting heaps. Ari had gone to pick through it, pocketing chicken bones and broken watches.

Ziva had gone immediately to the edge of the roof. She'd stood with her toes curled over the edge, arms thrust out. She'd gone to the edge just to scare her brother into thinking she might jump. He had sworn at her, and then laughed and done the same.

And they had run and played and lounged on the rooftops, burning their toes, earning scornful looks from old mothers far below. They traced the routes of Templars and pretended they were soldiers. On the corrugated lip of a bakery, they had found two Domari boys smoking cigarettes. They made friends, and played until the sun went down and the boys had to climb back to the street to bend their knees and pray.

Ziva and Ari remained, watching as the light disappeared into the west.

"I'm going to be a doctor," Ari told her when the night had grown so thick that she couldn't see his face anymore. "I want to leave this place."

Ziva bit her lip; wrung her hands.

"I'm going to be a ballerina," she had said.

Both of them had lied.

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><p>Their father had never known which of his elder children would make the better soldier; he had banked on both of them, and sometimes neither, but usually put his faith in one above the other and watched as they fought for his favor. He seemed to enjoy the sport of it. He seemed to enjoy their struggle, and maybe even convinced himself that it would turn them <em>both <em>into soldiers worthy of merit.

Halfway into her training with Mossad, Ziva's father had taken her aside with a special request: an important mission with the Americans in the Soviet Bloc, he had told her. Mossad was being asked to provide an officer, and she would be an excellent candidate.

She may have been pleased, may have been flattered, may have interpreted his candor as an affirmation of her skills – but she'd known her father far too well, even then, to pretend that this wasn't just another part of just another game.

And so when she'd gone to meet with the American liaison in a dim-lit office in Tel Aviv, she had not been surprised to find Ari there waiting there for her. Smiling.

Because her father had done it again: he had sent them both to fight for it.

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><p>Without preamble, Ari had made his case known to the American.<p>

"Ziva is fickle," he argued, lacking tact and professionalism on a dangerous level. "She cares too much."

"I care for my country," she'd said, and turned to the liaison with a tight smile. "Where I come from, this is called _loyalty_."

He narrowed his eyes. "In America we call it patriotism, and it's a word that's rapidly losing integrity. We can't have an officer blinded by dutiful ideology groping around in the U.S.S.R. like a lost dog looking for a master. Your _loyalty _to anything other than your mission and your ally will make you weak." The American had waved as if to dismiss her entirely. "We'll take the man."

And that was that. She'd felt her blood boiling.

"He has other obligations," she blurted, almost scoffing.

Ari glanced at her coolly from the corner of his dark, sleepy eyes.

"_Bevakashah, _Ziva. You are making yourself look _needy_."

"Jesus," the diplomat sighed. He scrubbed his palm against his face. "Does Mossad train all of its officers to act like petulant children? Enough bickering. This is decided. Officer David, I'm sorry, but you can go home – Haswari, pack your things. Be sure to bring some turtlenecks. Chechnya is cold this time of year."

"Chechnya is always cold," Ari grinned, and Ziva resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

They had tried to regain their professionalism; sent the liaison off with a handshake, and then retreated back into the hall, where again they became children. Siblings fighting for favor.

"That was almost sad," Ari said to her.

"_Atah nakhash ganev,_" she spat."And that was _pathetic_."

"You are such a gracious loser. You would not like the Caucasus, anyway. They are too cold for you."

"You have never_ been _to the Caucasus!"

"I've been to Scotland," he said, and deadpanned. "It was cold."

She glanced at him, furrowing her brow and trying, suddenly, not to be amused.

"You know you haven't won yet," she said. "They are going to pick me."

He threw a glance over his shoulder.

"Have you not heard, Ziva? They already picked me."

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><p>And then, something strange: an explosion in the West Bank. Casualties. Something tragic. Ari had been forced to retreat very suddenly, and her father had called with the grave news that Ari's mother was dead – and then, with a low and deliberate voice, he had told Ziva that she should pack her things.<p>

Because she would be taking Ari's place on his mission to Chechnya.

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><p>Ari was never the same. Their scramble for favor seemed to swiftly shrivel up; and she would tell herself that they were simply getting older, growing up, that it didn't matter anymore. That her father loved them both. That he saw their merit; knew that his children had become exceptional soldiers.<p>

One day, in the middle of a mission, her father had called her into his office for a private discussion. Ari was in trouble, he'd told her. Something had happened in America.

He asked her, as a control officer, to resolve the situation; and, as a sister, to fetch her wayward brother. Bring him home.

But she had seen that conflict swimming in her father's eyes, and knew, even then, with a tremendous weight in her belly – that her brother was already gone.

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><p>A jolt, a puff of smoke, and it was over. She had never before felt the heat of the kickback on her hand; had never realized how heavy the gun actually felt, or how the smell caught in her lungs and made her hiccup.<p>

She paid great attention to the gun. Tried to ignore the body in a quickly expanding pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.

In a daze, she'd gone to him.

And she thought of that night on the roof in Akko, wishing that neither one of them had ever touched this world; wishing that he'd been a doctor, that she'd been a ballerina.

She prayed over the body of her brother.

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><p>"I am coming home, Abba."<p>

There was a long pause on the other end. She hoped that he was glad, hoped in a way that almost made her sick that he believed that Ari would be coming home with her, absolved and alive. He couldn't be surprised by a death he had all but ordered, but she hoped that her father had loved his son, because that meant _something, _and she just hoped he'd be surprised. She hoped, and for a moment, it made her sick.

"Ari?" he asked.

She turned her eyes to the open hangar. The night was closing in around her; wet and cool with rain.

"Ari is dead," she fumbled over her tongue for a moment and then added a lilting "Abba" to the end of her sentence, hating the way it inflected, hating how small she felt. How her father and death could make her small.

There was a pause. She imagined him sinking nimbly down into his seat. Staring at a wall. Imagined grief on his face and realized with a soft jolt that they'd been here once before, she'd twice had the chance to tell her father that one of his children was dead and neither time had she seen it on his face; for he had always been a world away.

"How?" he asked.

She swallowed hard and almost bit her tongue. Gibbs' voice echoed in her mind.

_Lie_, she thought, and took comfort in the cold of the night.

"He tried to kill Agent Gibbs. He killed Agent Todd, Abba, he assassinated her and then tried to do the same to Gibbs," and then she leapt over the lie without missing a beat, "and he killed him in self-defense."

She tried to convince herself that the pause which followed was shorter than it felt. When her father spoke again, if he knew that she was lying, he did not let it show in his voice.

"Come home, Ziva. Bury your brother."

_Lo emet v'lo shalom. _And Ari was dead.

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><p>AN: Building up to Jenny in the next chapter (Chechnya! Vodka! Gunfights!)

Anyway - psychologists have suspected for quite some time that there is a correlation between awesome summer vacations and plentiful reviews. Vacationers who fail to leave reviews for the stories they read report, on a whole, that their summer vacations pretty much sucked.

It's true. Even if it wasn't...would you want to take that risk?


	3. Foxes and Furrows

**A/N:** I apologize for the delay in posting this chapter. To make a long story very short: I was unexpectedly accepted into grad school back in September, and at the same time began working three part-time jobs. Then I had a major health crisis. Then spent some time in Israel and the West Bank. So I haven't really slept or done anything but homework and grain size analysis and plane-hopping for the last few months.

But I really wanted to continue this story, and I so appreciate the feedback I've gotten.

Fair warning about the Jenny Shephard bit: I don't know much of her backstory and have thusly taken many liberties.

And one last note: I have been to Chechnya accidentally and Georgia on purpose, and deliberately tooled this chapter to reflect what little knowledge I possess about the Black Sea/Caspian region. This leans quite heavily on the paradigm that "writers ought to write what they know." Suffice to say I never came across any great arms dealers – but may have skirted a land mine or two near Grozny.

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><p>The mission fell into her lap as if by some cosmic intervention. Later, she would remember it as a sign of kismet – that she had been destined to go. That this was the mission which would spark in her the very first embers of her own inner revolution. A large part of that would be owed to Jenny Shephard, and the people whom she knew. And Ziva thought she was <em>meant <em>to go, she would later reason with herself. It was the very first step in a series of events that would forever change her course in life.

She would later convince herself: it was preordained.

All because Ari was suddenly out of the picture, mourning for the death of his mother. She grieved for her brother's loss and his pain, and was secretly grateful for the opportunity that it presented her.

Before parting, they met at a tiny café in Nablus, where she offered her condolences and tactfully tried not to seem pleased by the turn of events.

"You get your wish," Ari had said, his eyes boring into her. "You get to take my mission from me."

She had been genuine and honest: "I didn't want it like this." And she tried to convince herself that he believed her.

And she would go to Chechnya in his place.

She would leave home – and a part of her would never quite return.

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><p>The briefing was a cold formality, and she sensed immediately that the commanding officer of the American operation held a distinct disinterest in the entire affair. He had been whittled down and smoothed by the gears of bureaucracy; just another man following his protocol. Cool and detached. Cynical toward the gains of war, and inexorably bound by its necessity.<p>

His name was Peter Gaddis, and she met him first in Tbilisi.

She respected him and loathed him almost immediately.

"We've got a lead about an arms dealer distributing American manufactured weapons to rebels in the North Caucasus," he informed her, sitting straight-backed in his under-lavished office. "They've been used in several attacks by both Chechens and Abkhazians, against anyone who meddles with them, really, including our allies here in Georgia. We need to get this under control before the Georgians start to suspect that _we're _the ones doing the supplying."

She put her hands together on her lap and fixed him with a scrutinizing glare. She understood quite well how the Americans worked – she knew how intelligence could blind itself in favor of the principles of democracy.

"How do we know that the weapons are not being supplied by Georgians?" she had asked, and watched as the muscles in his jaw began to twitch. "They have reason to favor the will of the Chechens if it means weakening Russian forces."

"We _don't_ know. But this is a good lead. We don't have a name, but we have a face."

He slid the open file across the desk. As she peered at the photo, Gaddis continued: "And we have a pseudonym. The Chechens call him _Lisiy._"

The man in the picture looked almost sickly; his face was drawn, his blue eyes milky and gleaming as if shrouded behind a thin membrane. A short white stubble puckered his chin, cheeks, and neck, and though his head was obscured by a dark wool cap, she suspected that he was bald or balding. He looked old and decrepit, she thought. He hardly seemed a menace – but she knew better than to trust appearances.

"Is he Chechen?" she asked. She laid the photo back down atop the file and met Gaddis's eyes.

He sighed.

"Hard to say. He may not be Chechen, Russian, _or _Georgian, for all we know."

She cut him a pointed look and he shook his head.

"But he's not American. And even if he was, I can assure you he's not operating under the approval of the U.S. government. He's living and doing business – the sordid kind – somewhere near Grozny. But he's been spotted on the Georgian side of the border, too."

Her mind flashed with the images of snow-capped mountains, rotting villages, guns knee-deep in pilfered Russian caravans.

"Where _exactly _are you sending me?" she asked.

"You and Shephard will be stationed in Grozny. There's a good chance that he'll go into the mountains to do business, so you need to be prepared to follow him there, too."

Utterly dissociated, Gaddis handed her a map of the Caucasian corridor, several sections pocked with small red circles which indicated possible rendezvous points.

Gaddis ran his hand across the surface of the map.

"You'll go where _Lisiy _goes. I've been promised that your skills are quite unmatched."

She smiled at the man and pocketed his map.

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><p>Ziva met Jenny Shephard for the very first time on a blustery autumn morning in Grozny. She had seen photos of the woman in her briefing: tall and unflinching, the woman demanded her respect without any preamble and left Ziva with a sense of morbid curiosity. Was this woman a killer, she wondered? Was that kind and open face the same façade she'd seen on the faces of so many soldiers back in Israel?<p>

Could this woman be trusted with her life or with the lives of those around her?

Picking her from a crowd wasn't hard – though in Grozny there was not a crowd to speak of – and she slipped into the booth across from Shephard and fixed her with a cool and analytical gaze.

"This place is nice," Ziva commented. A waiter hustled by and placed a glass of water on the table between the two women. Outside, the noise of ramshackle cars squealing up and down the main road mingled with a constant hum of wind against paper and plastic bags in the street. Someone was shouting in broken Russian. Stray dogs wandered up the sidewalks, peering into store fronts with milky eyes and muddy noses, searching for scraps of food.

Jenny smiled.

"It's strange, right? A little café in the heart of Chechnya, surrounded by all this clutter. If you look out the back door, you can actually _see _the mountains smoldering. And our accommodations are so grand – did you know that there's a pool up on the roof?"

"Smoldering?"

"From the Chechens laying land mines at the border. They don't seem to be very good at remembering where they left them."

Ziva eyed the woman. She placed her hands atop the table and took note of the woman's demeanor, intensely prepared to distrust her.

"Have you been to Grozny before?"

"Never," Shepherd replied. "Maybe that's why I notice all the clutter."

"You get used to the smoke."

Shepherd furrowed her brow, leaning forward.

"Yes," she said. "You're Israeli. I imagine you'd know."

Of course, Ziva thought, Jenny Shepherd could not even _begin _to imagine.

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><p>As they prepared a van to trail the brother of the legendary <em>Lisiy<em>, Shepherd turned to Ziva with a smile and remarked: "You're his daughter."

Ziva frowned.

"Whose?"

"The Director of Mossad. Director David. You have the same name, and…that same look on your face."

"What look?"

Shepherd smiled, then looked away and continued loading arms into the open back of the van. Neither woman seemed the least bit phased by the fact that their load of weapons did not draw a single curious glance from passersby.

"The look that's telling me that I should stop talking," she said.

Ziva very nearly laughed.

* * *

><p>Something went wrong. They trailed the wrong man – the <em>right <em>man, actually, though his demeanor suggested that he ought not be trifled with, period.

Nearly as soon as the van began tailing the little black sedan, shots began to ricochet all across the street. Ziva worked her way into a calculated frenzy; veered, gained full control of the steering wheel, and put all her weight against the gas pedal. They sped through the winding streets of Grozny as a wave of bullets exploded against the windshield.

There was blood in her eyes. She was stricken by the urge to swipe at it but kept her hands gripped tightly to the steering wheel, gaze fixed forward as buildings, cars, and civilians flickered by in her periphery. As long as there was nothing in her path, she'd be fine; as long as they kept moving.

"Ziva, _for the love of God_."

Somewhere in the back of the van, Shepherd was falling to pieces.

Her voice was almost comically alarmed. Ziva felt a bubbling urge to laugh at it but stifled that, too. She just had to keep moving. Whatever had compelled Shepherd to be more panicked by Ziva's driving than she apparently was by the people who were pursuing them was a topic she'd have to save for later reflection.

She slammed across a speed bump that couldn't be avoided and the car pitched briefly up and then down again. The bumper shrieked noisily against the pavement as it reconnected. Ziva groped for control over the steering wheel as Shepherd started swearing.

"_Tishar lematah!_" Ziva shouted, and then immediately corrected herself: "Keep your head down!"

The voice that reached her from the back seat sounded entirely unamused.

"What did you _think _I was doing?"

"Why don't you go back to swearing. Distract yourself. Keep your head down."

She swung around a corner and narrowly avoided a panicked wave of oncoming traffic.

"We will be there shortly."

She could hear Jenny retching in the back seat.

* * *

><p>Somewhere near the foot of the mountains, their pursuers lost the battle, and Ziva swung the van into the driveway of an old and seemingly abandoned cabin. Just beyond the drive, an old Soviet tank half-buried in straw gleamed against the night. It seemed like a terrible hideout on the face of it, but they were strapped for time, Ziva was injured, and there were so few other options. Night had fallen by then. They slipped into the darkness of the cabin and bolted the doors.<p>

Ziva ransacked the cupboards, brushing away several years of dust and cobwebs as she searched for medical supplies and food. Somewhere in the crevices of her mind, she wondered if this cabin had seen any human life in twenty years. She wondered if this was a relic of the Second World War or a relic of the Soviet era.

Shepherd watched her move and after a moment attempted to lighten the mood.

"We've gone from ritzy to rustic in under 24 hours," she said. "I'm getting whiplash."

Ziva seemed not to hear her.

"Not many supplies," Ziva reported. "…unless you'd count liquor."

Shepherd perked up.

"Anything good?"

"It's all vodka."

"That will do."

As Ziva turned to clear a table to treat her wounds, she caught sight of Shepherd in her periphery and paused.

"You are shaking," Ziva observed.

Jenny let out a breath and pressed her hands together to steady them.

"Near death experience," she breathed.

Ziva smiled non-menacingly at her.

"Not _so_ near. Calm down. Relax. We are out of trouble."

"For the moment."

Ziva nodded idly, blotting a rag with vodka. "For the moment," she agreed.

"Do you need any help with that?"

Ziva considered for a moment and then shook her head. She immediately tried to mask the sudden wave of nausea that accompanied the movement and reminded herself not to do that again. "No," she answered, "I think it will be fine."

With the rag in hand, she quietly went to work patting down the wounds at her scalp. She stared deliberately forward, at a plank in the wall, to distract herself from how much it actually hurt, and was quietly ashamed of how rapidly her eyes began to water. Jenny, to her credit, had the decency to look away as Ziva worked, sparing her the embarrassment and allowing her to cling to her pride.

When the cut was about as clean as it would get, Ziva finally let the rag fall to her lap. She lifted the bottle of vodka and took a swig for good measure.

"You've had worse, I take it," Shepherd said, at length.

Ziva wanted to grimace at how patronizing that sounded, but tried to remind herself that Shepherd meant well.

"Yes," Ziva answered simply. And took another sip of vodka.

"Me too," Jenny muttered.

Ziva cocked a smile and offered her the bottle of vodka.

Shepherd declined.

"They'll probably come looking for us," she said.

Ziva shrugged.

"Of course they will. That's why I am drinking."

"Drink as much as you want. Get some sleep. I'll be on guard tonight."

Ziva shook her head and had to grind her teeth together to fight back the second wave of nausea; the liquor certainly wasn't helping. "That was not the arrangement," she said, setting the bottle on the ground and getting to her feet. "I am escorting _you_."

"You're wounded, Ziva. You did your job, you saved both of our asses. Now let me make it up to you. Sleep. We'll regroup in the morning."

Undaunted, Ziva lifted her Berretta and slipped across the room, kneeling just beside an open window which overlooked the field and the carcass of the felled tank. She shifted so that her gun was steady and level across one knee.

"I am escorting _you_," she repeated. "Get some sleep."

* * *

><p>The shadows crept in at the darkest hour of the morning, just before dawn. She had seen them coming; had sensed them. Quickly, silently, she roused Jenny from her sleep and pressed a gun into her hand.<p>

The gunmen were inside.

The night was about to turn bloody.

* * *

><p>"<em>Jenny<em>." She could taste blood at the back of her throat. Speaking required lot of effort, and every breath she took elicited a jolt of pain which traveled up her belly. She winced, trying to draw closer to her.

"_Jen_…?" One syllable was easier than two.

But Jenny wasn't moving.

Suddenly, there was a phone cupped in the palm of her hand, and she pressed it shakily up to one ear.

"_Vashe situatsiya?_" _What is your emergency? _Crisp, lilting Russian. She knew this language. It took her a moment to recall the words.

"Ambulance," she blurted in English. Blood and saliva bubbled at the corner of her mouth. She swallowed hard and her vision flared. "_Medamem_." Hebrew. Finally, she grit her teeth and tried again: "_Skoraya_."

"_Vy raneny?_" _Are you hurt?_

She furrowed her brow and tried to kick-start the part of her brain that normally did the translating. "_Moy drug zastrelen...krovotecheniye_…" _My friend is shot…bleeding…_

"_Vy raneny?_" the operator repeated.

Ziva nodded. Then remembered that the operator couldn't see her.

"_Da,_" she said.

There was a momentary pause on the other line. It was only a second, but it felt like such a long time that her eyelids began to droop. When the voice returned it startled her so badly that her heart skipped a beat.

"Can you give me your location?"

Ziva stared at the ceiling.

She couldn't remember the right words.

She couldn't remember _any _words.

"Can't…" she ground out. The taste of blood had gotten stronger. "Hurts."

The operator began to speak again, but Ziva didn't hear him. She rolled painfully onto her side, leaving the phone on the ground behind her, and began dragging herself back to Jenny. She prayed the operator would figure out their location. She needed to see that Jenny was still breathing.

When she finally got to her side, Ziva slumped down next to her and pressed one feeble hand against her jugular. The pulse was weak, but there. She let out a breath.

In her periphery, she could see the trail of dark red that had followed her movement across the carpet, and she knew it wasn't a good sign that her hands and her fingers were beginning to go numb. She laid her palm across Jenny's wound again, pressing with the strength she had left, knowing that it probably wouldn't do much good, but needing to do _something_. She tried not to think about her own wound – which was becoming increasingly difficult.

But she was a soldier, and Jenny was her charge. She had to be sure that Jenny was alright.

"Jen…" she slurred. She could hear her own heartbeat thrumming in her ears. She pressed her fingers into the torn and blood-drenched fabric of Jenny's shirt, her ear against her cheek, sticky with blood. "_Ze be'seder._"

Her eyes drifted shut. She listened to the sound of her own heartbeat, curled like a dog at Jenny's side. Behind her eyelids came the memory of a flash of white, the hood of the car barreling down the street in Grozny; smoke in Ramallah; her sister's small, sweet voice singing up to her.

Time lurched back into the present with a jolt of pain and she grimaced, the ache of her own wound white-hot, before promptly losing consciousness.

* * *

><p>She awoke some time later. The sky beyond the window of the cottage had gone a lighter shade of gray, thick with rain clouds. Ziva found that she could hardly move – it felt as though her body had been sapped of everything. She suspected that she'd lost a dangerous amount of blood already, and the ambulance, if it ever came, would not come in time to save them. Gagging against the taste of stale blood thick on her tongue, she forced herself onto her hands and knees, woozily peering around the darkened cottage. She had supplies. She could do this. She would do whatever could be done. She dared not spare a glance at Jenny, too afraid to find that her charge had already bled out.<p>

Shivering, dazed, and sick with pain, Ziva scooted toward the corner where they'd left their meager packs. After a foot of progress, she found that she was able to crouch, and then to stand supporting herself heavily against the edge of a table. Maybe her wound wasn't so bad, after all; or maybe this was the infamous _last push _of a body drawn too close to death. She shook her head. Somewhere outside, the echoing chatter of morning birds foretold the coming dawn, and she was briefly stricken with the strange desire to shoot them.

When finally she made it to the packs, she tried to work quickly, though her hands were numb and trembling violently. She felt around for anything useful, knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that she had emergency medical supplies in there somewhere. When her hand closed around two air-tight aluminum packages, she remembered that this was precisely what she needed, clutched it against her chest and made her way back to Jenny – or Jenny's body – emboldened with fear and adrenaline.

As she passed the table, she swiped the bottle of vodka, too.

She fell to Jenny's side and tore open the first package, a compact clotting sponge falling into her hand. She'd used these before on the battlefield, in the worst case scenarios, both on herself and on her comrades. Sometimes it worked. She could make it work.

She didn't even bother to check for a pulse before she unwrapped the sponge and pressed it firmly to the wound at Jenny's side, some logic breaking through in Ziva's mind telling her that of course it was too late, if Jenny had been in danger of bleeding out, it would have happened already. But she hadn't been unconscious very long…had she? The night had been approaching dawn already when they'd been shot…maybe, it was only moments. Maybe this wasn't so futile.

In the darkness of the cottage, she could see a deep, hot liquid pooling up between her hand and the sponge. She flexed her fingers and more of the blood oozed out, but she pressed more firmly, undaunted, nearing desperation. She moved her index finger directly into the bullet wound and began packing the sponge in as tightly as she could, her hands already slick with blood, the movement eliciting a horrific squelching sound as she moved. The blood still seemed to leak at an alarming rate, which was a good sign: it meant the heart was still pumping, the artery still hemorrhaging. With one hand firm against the wound, Ziva reached for the second package and tore it open with her teeth to expose a neatly wrapped pressure bandage. Wasting no time, she left the sponge in and unwrapped the bandage, tightly twisting it around Jenny's abdomen and securing one end through the pressure loop. Bits and pieces of memories flitted in the back of Ziva's mind – all the gnarled soldiers for whom she'd done this service. How many had survived? She tried and failed to count them all.

She proceeded to wrap the wound meticulously, as tightly as she could, her heart still thrumming painfully inside her chest and blood still smeared across her hands and wrists. She tacked the bandage and then let out a breath.

Falling back into her ankles, she stared silently at the work she'd done, nearly out of breath. Only then did she dare to peer at Jenny's chest. After several heart-stopping moments, she saw it: the ragged, weak little rise and fall that indicated Jenny was still breathing.

Exhausted, Ziva buried her face in her bloodied hands. Then she took a swig from the bottle of vodka, coughed, and closed her eyes.

When her strength began to return, Ziva figured it was time to assess her own wound. She scooted back against the wall and rolled up her blouse, exposing a dark mess of blood beneath, and the darker, slicker circle of marred flesh where surely the bullet had entered her. Taking a breath to steady herself, she let one feeble hand wander around her side and to her back, and it didn't take long for her to detect the puckered flesh of the exit wound. That was excellent news: through and through. She was still breathing, and still moving, and it seemed as though the bullet had gone in only inches from her side and had exited not far below. It had likely managed to miss any major organs. And if it had hit an artery, she'd already be dead.

Relief washed over her. Not yet out of the woods, so to speak, but this was a joyfully manageable wound. She tried not to dwell on the fact that this life and her training had somehow tempered her to find gross injuries actually exciting when they proved non-fatal. Gripping the bottle of vodka again, smearing its long glass neck with blood, she let out a hiss and poured some of the liquid onto her wound. This time, the tears came freely, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out.

* * *

><p>By the time she'd sewn her own wound shut to the best of her abilities, given the circumstances, Jenny had begun to stir. Another excellent sign. Perhaps this awful night was finally coming to a close.<p>

Ziva scooted back toward her charge and placed her hand against Jenny's shoulder.

"Jenny?"

The woman's eyes fluttered. A low, strangled moan tried to escape from deep in her throat.

"I know this hurts. Do you remember what happened? Can you open your eyes?"

After several quiet minutes of trying, Jenny's eyes finally opened half-way, the lids swollen and red. She coughed, winced violently, and turned her eyes toward Ziva.

"Got shot," she said.

"Yes."

"Not dead?"

"Not dead."

"It's bad?"

Ziva glanced at the wrappings on Jenny's wound, then met her eyes again.

"I have seen worse."

Jenny grimaced. It may have been a smile.

"That's a small comfort."

Ziva smiled down at her.

"I dressed the wound. We need to get to a hospital. Soon."

"Where are the rats that did this?"

Ziva's brow furrowed.

"Rats?"

"The thugs. The guys with the big guns. They still around?"

Ziva looked pointedly to one corner of the room, and then to another, and again to a heap beneath the window.

"They are here. But they are no longer a threat."

Jenny sighed.

"Excellent." Then she glanced at Ziva's shirt, at the blood that had stained it from an olive green to a dark, wet burgundy. "You hurt?"

Ziva followed her gaze.

"Most of this is yours."

"Didn't answer my question."

"Yes, but my wounds are not bad."

"You wouldn't lie to me?"

"Not at the moment, no."

There was a beat of silence. Then, still trembling, Ziva rose onto her knees, forced herself into a standing position, and peered far out the window at the rainy morning light.

"We should start moving," she said.

Jenny nodded feebly, her eyes falling shut once again.

* * *

><p>It happened suddenly.<p>

She couldn't bring herself to move. The warm, coppery haze of the diner stifled her lungs and made her eyes ache, and somewhere to her right Tony was staring bleakly down at the phone in his hand, but Ziva couldn't move. Couldn't take her eyes away from the bloodied body on the ground. Dust swirled on the floorboards in a draft.

She was overcome with a feeling that was at once exhausting and heartbreakingly childish: the urge to wrap up Jenny's body. To tend to her. Treat her. Because she could make that work…couldn't she? Hadn't they been through worse?

"Come on," Tony gently coaxed, sensing her distress and wanting to get away from the carnage. But Ziva remained.

* * *

><p>She thought of the cottage in Chechnya with the ridiculous burned out tank in the front lawn and the gunfight and the gunmen huddled in their corners, beneath the window. How she and this woman had once leaned shoulder-to-shoulder and somehow…somehow it hadn't come to this.<p>

* * *

><p>Concern for Tony drove her to subtlety, but the urge to let this latest grief consume her proved too strong. At home with a bottle of Khortytsa silver vodka, she thought of the bright white car pitching up and down in Grozny; the blood on her hands and that quiet, terrifying night in the cottage. They had left that place as comrades. She had seen so much of herself in Jenny Shepard after that – they'd both been warriors of a sort, bound together in strange and foreign places with gunmen lurking like snakes in the mountains.<p>

And she had known her life would end like that: bullet-ridden, bloodied, and alone in a strange place.

But to see that end on this friend, this person with whom she'd nearly died. The helplessness and grief consumed her.

This was the end of the road for a soldier.

This was how warriors died.

She took a swig of vodka, said a prayer, and cried herself to sleep.

* * *

><p><strong>AN**: I'm leaving to do research in Britain, Spain, Morocco, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Israel, and the West Bank late next month, and for every review you offer up I promise to leave a pebble in your name in some important place. Come on. You know you want a rock with your name on it floating somewhere on the Andalusian coast. Don'tcha?


	4. Devils

A/N: Okay, change of plans. Some nasty stuff happened while I was in Spain and I had to cut my research trip short, detoured for a spell in Israel to recuperate and came back home prematurely. Bright side? Quicker updates.

I was a little conflicted with this chapter…because originally, Mike Franks was meant to be one of the six character deaths I set out to explore, and on my old hard drive (when I was first outlining this story back in 2012) I actually wrote most of the Mike Franks chapter, but it got lost somewhere in the data transfer. And honestly, even though I found a decent angle for it, I was uncomfortable with that particular chapter because I didn't feel comfortable with the character. And the points that I was meaning to make about Franks' death were actually very similar to points I already made in the chapter about Jenny.

So instead…I decided to swap out Franks for another character here. Now, because I try to keep my fics consistent and compatible, some of what I've written here is a reiteration of points that I made in other fics (namely _The Lances Unlifted, Becoming, _and _The Conjugates_…and, okay, _Hocus Pocus _to a much lesser extent) but I made a serious effort to take some new insights that would vibe with the overarching theme of this particular fic.

This chapter is also a lil' different because it's now dealing with characters that were introduced/died during the series rather than before. It's also just different in general. Kinda choppy. Not my best.

Anyhow…enjoy!

And thanks for all the reviews!

* * *

><p>For a month before the mandated therapy began, she would awaken at the tail end of the same dream: a resounding gunshot piercing the muddied window, the lurch of his skull upon impact, the sound of his body falling to the ground. A strange, unbidden wave of grief. Shocked silence despite the scuffle.<p>

And a fleeting, unwarranted kind of envy at the fact that she wasn't the one who had pulled the trigger – wasn't the one who had killed Saleem Ulman.

She would awaken with grief for a man she hated.

* * *

><p>She would remember how cold his hands had been; how mockingly tactile and hard. She would remember the sloppy coldness of his saliva. The look in his eyes like a dead thing being brought back to life. Knowing that she had been reduced to a simple distraction from a life of hate and boredom; something for him to kindle, to hurt, to control.<p>

Something to do.

And how badly she wished she could slide a knife into his ribs.

* * *

><p>As if unaware of Ziva's extensive and unfortunate experience as a victim of torture, the woman sitting beside her in her group therapy session misread Ziva's quietly revolted expression for guilt; patted her softly on the shoulder and crooned: "We always know that we shouldn't blame ourselves for what happened, but we do it anyway, don't we?"<p>

Ziva's jaw tightened.

"I do not blame myself for being tortured."

And she'd wanted so very badly to add: _I blame myself for having missed the chance to kill him._

* * *

><p>The sun had barely moved above the horizon, and the asphalt on the edge of the turnpike was already hot enough to scathe her knees as she kneeled. She clicked her tongue and rocked back onto her heels. The weight of the camera in her hands seemed cruel. Crouching back beneath the shade of a pine tree, she snapped another photo of the roadside.<p>

She sensed Tony's approach and had to control herself to keep from grimacing. It was still too early to deal with him.

"What're you doing?"

She replied without looking up: "Photographing the scene."

"The scene is over there. You got a telephoto lens on that thing?"

"There may be evidence here. I am simply being _thorough_."

He clucked his tongue and peered around at the tree.

"Oh," he said, a grin in his voice. "I get it. You're keeping to the shade. Very sneaky, David."

She shot him an exasperated look, nearly pouting.

"It is _too hot_."

"Aren't you from the desert?"

"I'm from Israel," she corrected. "It is not all one big desert. It snows in Jerusalem, you know."

Tony's jaw twitched as he slid his gaze to the far side of the road, where the body of Natalie Gardner lay still and badly mutilated in the scorching morning light.

"Eaten by wolves on the Connecticut Turnpike," he mumbled, shuddering.

Not far away, McGee cut him a look.

"Raccoons, Tony. She was eaten by raccoons." he said.

"And in Virginia," Ziva added for good measure.

Tony ignored them.

* * *

><p>In a thicket of weeds and dead grass not far from Natalie Gardner's corpse, a glint of metal caught Ziva's eye. She snapped a photo and, careful not to sting herself on the thistles which lined the field, maneuvered her hand into the space and retrieved the remains of a silver dog tag. The bottom edge was jagged and bent; the eyelet and all the metal that had once surrounded it was gone. But the name, though caked now with mud, stood out clearly: <em>Vincent Landing.<em>

* * *

><p>Most of the patients in her therapy group were soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan; a few older ones who had been civilians in Kuwait and Rwanda and Sudan; a woman from Somalia; another one taken by soldiers in the open streets of Guinea; a veteran of the army who had been taken from a training base, beaten, and tortured by Abkhaz rebels near the Kodori Gorge.<p>

She had been asked if she would have preferred an all-female support group, in light of the details of her torture, but she primly declined.

She had nothing to be ashamed of.

At least nothing to do with _that_.

* * *

><p>It wasn't long before they'd managed to track down a home address. While Ducky was still working with the body down in the morgue, Gibbs ordered Tony and Ziva to check on the whereabouts of their only suspect, Vincent Landing.<p>

"On it, boss," Ziva had blurted before Tony could get a word in.

Tony shot her a surprised and dejected look, and she smiled sweetly back at him.

"Sorry," she said. "Go ahead, Tony."

He looked at Gibbs.

"_On it_, _boss_."

She spoke once to the man who'd been tortured by Abkhaz rebels. He rarely opened up during their sessions. But she had bumped into him, once, while pouring coffee, and as she moved to apologize he simply smiled, brow knit, eyes cast elsewhere, as if his attention were split. She shrugged it off.

PTSD does funny things to people.

In group, he occasionally gave details of his captivity in blunt, emotionless diatribes.

"I thought I heard somebody was comin' in to save me," he would say. "But it was just more of the same. Guys with sacks on their heads, the eyes cut out. Maybe not men. Maybe monsters. Anyway, they'd put a gas mask over my head and seal off the tube so I couldn't breathe. My hands cuffed under the chair. The pressure inside'd get so bad I thought my eyes were gonna pop right outta their sockets. They'd be laughin', sayin' _why ain't he breathin'? _And then I die and they take off the mask and I come around again. Them devils still in the room, just laughin'."

His tonelessness sent shivers down her spine.

There was a pair of sun-bleached antlers fixed with chord to the grill of the truck when they arrived at the address they'd been given. She stared at it as they headed up the driveway and felt a strange tug of recognition that she couldn't quite place – she was sure she'd seen the truck before. It unsettled her that she couldn't remember _where_.

But then they were knocking on his door, and before she'd had a chance to prepare herself, Vincent Landing was standing across from them, staring at her in calm, controlled surprise.

The man from her sessions. The man who'd been beaten by Abkhaz.

"Ziva," he said, sounding shocked, but oddly cheery. "What're you doing here?"

She hesitated for only a moment. Only a moment, but she could feel Tony shifting nervously beside her. She couldn't bring herself to speak and in the silence, Tony stepped up, flashing his NCIS badge by way of explanation.

"Vincent Landing?" he asked.

Vincent nodded.

"We're with NCIS. Seems your tag was found with a corpse on Shafer Road."

She wondered if it was the heat or Vincent's familiarity with her that made Tony blunt. She realized with a jolt that she didn't much care either way.

"Oh?" Vincent replied.

Tony scoffed.

"Yeah, 'oh.'"

"Well I had to hitch up that way about a week ago. My truck got laid up and I had to get into town. It could've fallen off then, I guess."

"Would you mind coming with us back to headquarters? Just to ask a few questions? Maybe get that tag back?"

He furrowed his brow, shot Ziva a blank look.

"Keep the tag. It don't mean nothin' much to me. But yeah, guess I can come along for just a bit."

* * *

><p>Saleem had once pushed iron nails up under her fingernails, meticulous and bored, mentioning off-handedly that iron was a good tool for expelling evil, and he believed that there was still much evil in her.<p>

She wanted nothing more than to press those nails into his eyeballs.

* * *

><p>"So…" Tony started once they'd returned to the car. Landing was sitting quietly in the backseat, distractedly watching the road flash by outside his window.<p>

She considered playing dumb, but she knew it wouldn't fly with him. She rolled her window down an inch and took a breath of the cool air running across its frame; really, it was too hot for her to have the patience for pretense.

"I barely know him," she whispered, at length.

"Boyfriend?" he asked. His face pinched up for a moment as he said it; it was only brief, but she noticed.

She shot him an indignant look.

"I said that I _barely know him_, Tony."

"Right," he said. "Sorry."

They lapsed into silence again for a beat.

"He is…" she started, glancing in the rearview mirror to be sure that Landing wasn't listening. "I _know _him…barely…we have spoken before."

"He seemed pretty happy to see you."

"Will this be a problem?"

"I think it depends on _how _you know him."

"I do not think that I can tell you. It's private."

"Oh." He looked hurt.

"It's not _my _privacy I wish to protect, Tony. It's his."

* * *

><p>"They'd put a slab of wood in my mouth and saw it back and forth so that it sheared my teeth," Landing would say in therapy, "and they'd tell me they were sawing <em>wolf canines.<em>"

* * *

><p>Gibbs figured it out almost immediately. Landing knew Ziva; Landing was in a support group for victims of war crimes.<p>

Gibbs caught her in the elevator. She shouldn't have been surprised by his intuition, should have been less surprised when he hit the _hold _button on the lift. But things had changed since Somalia. She found she scarcely cared.

Without prompting, she elaborated on the question that she knew he'd ask:

"Landing is in a support group for victims of…for former prisoners of war. He was held captive in Georgia last year. That is how I know him."

Gibbs refused to meet her eyes.

"From the support group," he said.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"About a year, on and off. It was a requirement for my continued employment at NCIS."

"That's all?"

"I barely know him."

* * *

><p>It was clear from the start that there was something wrong with Landing, and Ducky was pulled in to watch through the glass as Ziva interrogated the man.<p>

"You see how he hesitates?" Ducky mused.

"They always hesitate, Duck."

"But he's _listening_. Look at him. He's trying to sift through the voices, to determine which of them is Ziva's."

"You think he's schizophrenic?"

"This would be difficult to fake. If he's lying, then he is certainly a talented actor."

* * *

><p>The confession didn't take long.<p>

"I went up the turnpike, but I was out past the boonies and there wasn't any light. No streetlamps or anything. It was real dark. I drive around a corner and my headlights come across this lady standin' with her car on the shoulder o' the road, and I'm wonderin', should I help her? But then there's somethin' else standin' in my headlights, some devil, and it says to me…this lady is bad. She's one of the bad ones. Like them that hurt you. You gotta cut her down to make it right."

"So you picked up a rock…"

"I don't like it, ma'am. I wanted it to stop, but they say 'cut her down.' They keep sayin' it. 'Cut her down.' So I did. I used the rock. Over and over. Until you couldn't see her face no more. And there's some song still playing from the radio in her car. _Hotel California_. It gets me all worked up. Can't stop. So I cut her down again and again and then her face is nothing. There's just nothing there."

He paused, his hands twisting together, and met Ziva's eyes.

"I've got devils, you know" he said. "Tellin' me things."

"Devils?"

"Yes'm. They find me at night. I don't want 'em to, that's why I go for drives when I can't sleep, so I can get away from them. But they find me anyway. Always have. They used to hide under the stairs when I was a boy, and at night they'd press 'emselves up against the floorboards to tell me things. I could hear 'em through the floors."

"What did they tell you?"

"Nasty things. I wasn't a good boy. They'd tell me so. Now they say I've got to redeem it. Make it better. 'Cause I wasn't a good boy, ma'am."

"Is that why you killed Natalie? To redeem yourself?"

His neck reddened and the muscles of his jaw began to jump. He maintained eye contact, his whole demeanor tense; but she could see his brow twitching, the way he hesitated.

"She was bad," he muttered. "The devils told me so. I took care of it 'cause she was bad."

"The voices told you to kill her."

"The devils did."

"Did they tell you why?"

"I don't ask."

"Why not?"

He ground his teeth. His eyes darted fleetingly to the tabletop and then back again, and she had the sudden realization that the look on his face was forced concentration, that he was trying to hear her above the noise.

"It don't matter why, ma'am," he said, looking away again.

She leaned forward.

"Vincent," she said. "Can you look at me?"

He forced his eyes upward.

"Are the devils speaking to you now?"

He stared and then, after a moment, eyes wide, he nodded. There was sweat beginning to glisten at his temple.

"What are they saying?" She wasn't sure why she was asking or if she even wanted to know the answer.

"They say…" he paused and ground his teeth again. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath as if to steady himself. "They're saying, 'cut her down.'"

Her stomach clenched.

"Cut who down?"

He stared.

"You. 'She's bad,' they say. 'Cut her down.'"

* * *

><p>The nightmare shifts – she remembers and a part of her present remembers for her. Laying on the dirt floor of her cell with her fingers broken, staring up at the thatched ceiling, wanting to be able to want to die.<p>

But all she can think of is putting those nails in Saleem Ulman's eyes. Driving a knife into him.

Devils come around her in the dark and whisper to her: "cut him down," and she thinks there will be no better feeling in the world than the day she finally manages to obey that cruel demand.

_Cut him down_.

_He's bad_.

* * *

><p>In that cell, it became an obsession. She was ready to die, but not before taking him with her. She imagined all the ways. All the pain. Humiliation. Everything that he deserved.<p>

_Cut him down. _

And then the bullet breaking through the window and he was dead in an instant on the floor and it felt like her breath had left her all at once. He was hers to kill.

He was _hers_.

And that resentment and disappointment and shame spun itself together like a bur of barbed wire and tucked itself away beneath her breastbone, burning and scathing, and something inside of her changed.

She shifted into a state of numbness.

That great death taken from her.

And a low, heart wrenching realization that a bit of her humanity had gone and rolled away again – because she wanted death like an animal, wanted death without rage or logic or demand. She felt a jolt of something primal.

And she hastily shoved it deep, deep down inside. She couldn't be that person anymore...could she?

* * *

><p>"Are you bad?" Landing asks from across the table.<p>

"I was."

"Have you got devils?"

"Sometimes."

"Did you redeem yourself?"

She hesitated, that primal something still burning to be let loose inside her chest. After a moment she knit her brow and glanced at the wall behind him, saying earnestly, "I'm working on it."

He sighed.

"Me too."

* * *

><p>Reviews are 100% gluten free, which is apparently a good thing for some reason. So just jump right on that bandwagon! Live healthy!<p> 


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